Bienvenue dans le matriarcat

Welcome to the matriarchyBarbara KayNational PostWednesday, June 14, 2006

TORONTO - If you live in Toronto, you may have noticed the Bathurst Street billboards sponsored by Jewish Women International Canada (JWIC). They all display the same emotive ad, featuring a shame-suffused, Jewish-looking woman, submissively tilting her face to offer a brutalized eye to the public gaze. The caption reads: "There is a Jewish woman you know being abused."

Community response has so far been equivocal, but muted. Now imagine public reaction to an alternative billboard message: an anguished man staring down from a 12-story ledge, captioned "There is a desperate Jewish man you know contemplating suicide because a woman falsely accused him of abuse, alienated his children and ruined his life ..."

Such a hypothetical men's ad would reflect a verifiable truth: Vengeful women of all provenance routinely (and usually with impunity) falsely allege abuse or otherwise block fathers' access to children; and while women's suicide rates remain constant after separation, the suicide rates amongst their ex-partners skyrocket.

The JWIC billboard is partly true: It dispels a popular myth that domestic violence isn't a Jewish community problem. At the same time, the ad's unnamed Everywoman indirectly reinforces two feminist myths: that Everyman, rather than individual males with personality disorders or other pathologies, is a potential abuser; and that women are always victims, never perpetrators.

But as University of British Columbia psychology professor Don Dutton points out in his new book, Rethinking Domestic Violence, partner abuse is almost always a predictable, bilateral problem springing from intimacy issues, with psychological roots in both sexes' early family dynamics. And despite what you read in the media, it's not always the man who strikes the first blow -- not by a long shot.

As Prof. Dutton further notes, myths around domestic violence extend into the shaping of all social policy, meeting little public resistance because indifference to men's needs is constantly endorsed through reinforcing public gestures.

For example, the offices of Jewish Family and Child Services (JF&CS) in Toronto have prominently displayed a poster of the battered woman ad where no arriving male client can avoid seeing it. There are also several pictures of "families" in the waiting room, in which no fathers -- only mothers and children -- appear. Of the 30 or so pamphlets on the rack, not one addresses the interests of fathers and children, only women. Men who visit this centre -- not in reality a "family" but a women's agency -- are made to feel pre-judged, reflexively guilty and superfluous to family life. On the evidence, it is difficult to imagine this effect as anything but the result of a calculated strategy.

I single out JF&CS because it is a good example of a general anti-male syndrome in social services (and because a group of Toronto Jewish men are in the process of organizing a class action civil suit on their own and their children's behalf against JF&CS). But all social service agencies are women-centric in pretty much the same degree.

For we now live in a matriarchy, at whose highest official levels men are unloved at best, with fatherhood itself perceived as a largely vestigial social function. As former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Claire L'Heureux-Dube once cavalierly opined, even loving non-custodial fathers only belong "in the background" of their children's lives.

In August, 2003, Supreme Court Justice Beverley McLachlin followed suit with: "We have to be pro-active in re-arranging the Canadian family" (my italics). Equating people with furniture or chess pieces is a totalitarian use of language, but consistent -- substituting gender for class -- with radical feminism's Marxist worldview.

All revolutions require an enemy to justify their depredations. For radical feminists, the dogma of inherently aggressive men and helpless victim women (nevertheless equipped to bring up children single-handedly!) is key to achieving the revolution's end: the transfer of moral authority from the traditional family to women and the state.

Feminist groups such as Jewish Women International Canada and JF&CS seem to be willing pawns in this mother-friendly, father-hostile, and ultimately child-abusive scheme. Canadian Jewish women, with every reason to take pride in their civilized and sexually wholesome cultural heritage, should be offended at being linked to it by association. So should all Canadian women. I certainly am.

I'll continue writing on anti-male bias in Canada next week, focusing on feminist fellow travellers in the criminal and family-law system, who exile disenfranchised fathers to a Kafkaesque non-custodial limbo.